Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#2Looking at some of the bus routes confirms something I've suspected about MUNI for a long time: most of the "delays" happen at the beginning of the route. I've watched bus drivers sit there for 10+ minutes past the departure time on many occasions, and there appears to be no penalty for the behavior.
I don't know if the drivers are taking a mandated minimum break, waiting in response to orders from dispatch, or just being lazy, but when I see lots of long delays at the top/bottom of every single line on these graphs, it really drives home the source of the problem. I find it difficult to believe that buses leaving at 5AM are encountering enough traffic to cause 15 minute delays immediately upon departure.
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#3This graphical schedule visualization is often called Marey's Trains.
https://mbostock.github.io/protovis/ex/caltrain.html
Another project that uses Marey's Trains is an interactive exploration of the MBTA system.
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#4Looks interesting.
One minor thing is that if the sorting of the bus lines was numeric rater than lexical I think it would be easier to find a specific bus line. Also the limited lines should be right after the regular lines (like 5L should be right after 5, 9L right after 9), though with a numeric sort this would just be fixed for free.
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#5This is awesome. Nice work.
Accurately shows the N-Judah ridiculousness I experienced this morning.
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#6What do the short black lines represent? I see some lines start, then abruptly end. Is that a train changing route assignments?
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#7Looking at some of the bus routes confirms something I've suspected about MUNI for a long time: most of the "delays" happen at the beginning of the route. I've watched bus drivers sit there for 10+ minutes past the departure time on many occasions, and there appears to be no penalty for the behavior. I don't know if the drivers are taking a mandated minimum break, waiting in response to orders from dispatch, or just…
Are you sure that's not "the bus driver is waiting for his clock to read the scheduled departure time" or "the bus driver is waiting for people to pay their fare and board the bus" or "the bus driver turned the bus on early to warm it up"?
Every bus I've ridden in has signs plastered all over the front saying how you need to idle it when starting up / shutting down the bus to avoid destroying the innards, so I would expect there to be long horizontal lines at the start/end of runs but I wouldn't expect that to be indicative of drivers being "lazy".
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#8Trying to compare against the published schedule isn't all that useful. As a resident of SF, I long ago gave up the idea that you could look up the scheduled arrival of a bus and plan around that. However, if a bus is supposed to be running every 12 minutes, that's the number you can plan around (or use to benchmark the performance of a bus line). So instead of trying to show how the times compare with the theoretical schedule I think this would be more useful to show how the buses deviate from the planned interval. If I know it's a 12 minute bus that means I should never have to wait at any given stop for > 12 minutes. If I'm standing there for 30 minutes, then the bus service is failing me.
It would also be useful to color code the historic tracks based on which trips ended up taking something like >10% or 20% longer than the planned time. Again not worrying about if it was late compared to the scheduled route, but just whether it was late relative to its own departure time and expected pace.
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#9You can actually see the delay the switch toward Embarcadero station causes outbound on KT/N.
Re: Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized
#10Looking at some of the bus routes confirms something I've suspected about MUNI for a long time: most of the "delays" happen at the beginning of the route. I've watched bus drivers sit there for 10+ minutes past the departure time on many occasions, and there appears to be no penalty for the behavior. I don't know if the drivers are taking a mandated minimum break, waiting in response to orders from dispatch, or just…
Are you sure that's not "the bus driver is waiting for his clock to read the scheduled departure time" or "the bus driver is waiting for people to pay their fare and board the bus" or "the bus driver turned the bus on early to warm it up"? Every bus I've ridden in has signs plastered all over the front saying how you need to idle it when starting up / shutting down the bus to avoid destroying the innards, so I would…
Hang out around Embarcadero Station during evening rush or 4th & King sometime. It's a real mess. I've seen 4 busses running back to back, and some mornings I'll see 5 or more trains backed up. Not to mention the entire system already runs at a snail's pace. I generally bike, and I will usually get there in about 1/2 the time. Compare to Chicago where there's no way I could outrun a CTA bus, let alone the trains.